Tim Steller's column: Tucson knows not to link rhetoric, assassination attempts

We don’t really need to go through this exercise again, do we?

After a young man tried to kill former president Donald Trump Saturday, many Republicans blamed strong political rhetoric against Trump for the shooting.

Sen. J.D. Vance, now Trump’s running mate, said via Twitter/X: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

This explanation is almost certainly false, even though excessive political rhetoric is a real problem in our country. The attempted assassination should not blunt our well-grounded criticisms of Trump — or of Biden.

We know this in Tucson, because it was the birthplace of modern efforts to link strong political rhetoric with an attempted assassination.

You probably remember when, on the day Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011, then-Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik blamed extreme political rhetoric.

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,” Dupnik said. “That may be free speech, but it may not be without consequences.”

A map also received blame. It was a map created by Sarah Palin’s political action committee, labeling Giffords’ district and other congressional districts as targeted for victory by the GOP by placing crosshairs on them. There is a question of good taste here, but the map had nothing to do with the attempt on Giffords’ life.

Similarly, in the days before Trump’s attempted killing, Biden said it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye” — a comment he apologized for later.

In the Tucson case, it turned out that the young man who shot Giffords and killed six others on that awful day was not inspired by extreme political rhetoric. He was terribly mentally ill, extremely detached from reality, and focused his misplaced ire about supposed illiteracy in society on his congresswoman.

On Thursday, I asked former Rep. Ron Barber, then Giffords’ district director, about whether political rhetoric inspired the man who shot Giffords and Barber himself, killing six other people as well.

“I’m convinced it had absolutely nothing to do with what he did,” Barber said.

Usually not politically motivated

I suspect we’ll end up coming to the same conclusion about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot at Trump, grazed him, and hit three others, killing one man. Investigators haven’t announced any possible motives, and the background information available doesn’t suggest a political one: He was a registered Republican in a Trump-supporting family.

This is not uncommon: Americans who attempt assassination usually lack a clear political motive. In a groundbreaking 1999 study by two Secret Service agents, they interviewed 83 people who attempted assassinations over a 50-year period.

“It was very, very rare for the primary motive to be political, though there were a number of attackers who appeared to clothe their motives with some political rhetoric,” one of the authors, Robert Fein, told NPR in 2011, in the aftermath of the attack on Giffords.

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Instead, the attackers tended to be people who felt invisible or had suffered deep disappointments. They were nobodies who wanted to be somebody, as Fein put it, but weren’t particularly politically motivated. The main exception they found to this rule was Sirhan Sirhan, who killed Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, saying it was in opposition to Kennedy’s support of Israel. But he was also motivated by wanting to gain notoriety, they found.

A more recent exception to this rule was James Hodgkinson, the man who shot at Republican congressmen playing baseball in June 2017. He was prone to angry outbursts against Trump and Republicans, and he converted that rage into violence by firing 70 rounds at GOP congressmen practicing baseball, injuring five of them.

Voices call for violence

A key factor, relevant in the Tucson case, is our broader violent culture. Psychotic people in the United States, when they hear voices, tend to hear violent messages more than people in other cultures do. I wrote about this in a 2022 column, in the aftermath of the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul.

People hearing voices in other places studied — India, Ghana and China, for example — tended not to hear the violent commands that psychotic Americans do. So, someone like Jared Loughner, who attacked Giffords, Barber and others, was probably affected by our violent culture without being directly influenced by political rhetoric.

That doesn’t mean we should just say that dehumanizing lies and threats are OK. Far from it. Trump’s language in this campaign has been especially concerning: He called American leftists “vermin” and said migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Dehumanizing language has often been a precursor not so much to assassination, but to violence against out groups, including genocides.

Barber is helping lead an effort, called the Arizona Democracy Resilience Network, that tries to respond quickly to and call out people who cross the line.

For example, in June, the vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party, Shelby Busch, pledged her ability to work with Christian Republican candidates but then said about Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who is Jewish: “If Stephen Richer walked into this room, I would lynch him.”

In a statement, the network called her out, appropriately, for “abhorrent … extreme rhetoric.” Of course, Busch was unapologetic and even chaired the GOP’s delegation to the Republican National Convention, casting Arizona’s votes for Trump.

A barrage of threats

Where political rhetoric has had a clear effect is in a barrage of threats against elected officials and government officeholders. They proliferated after the Trump team’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election’s result. Across the state, election officials have quit their jobs as a result.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes referred to the campaign of threats as “domestic terrorism,” reasoning that terrorism is “a threat or violence for a political outcome.”

These are the sorts of things that have had a real-world impact in Arizona recently. Twelve of the state’s 15 county election directors have quit since the 2020 election many citing threats. Clint Hickman, a Maricopa County supervisor, decided against running for re-election after experiencing protests at his home and threats so severe that one man was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison as a result.

So, there’s no reason to listen to Vance about the attempt to kill Trump, or to fellow U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, who said via Twitter/X: “This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”

This party line amounts to a campaign to shut down legitimate and important criticism of the former president. To say a man who tried to violently overturn the results of the 2020 election threatens democracy is completely reasonable. So is calling him an authoritarian.

But threats and violent rhetoric can have a real-world impact without even turning into violence.